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The genesis of modern telecom networks can be traced to the electromagnetic telegraph first conceived of by Samuel FB Morse in 1832. Morse constructed an experimental version in 1835. However, his idea eventually took off only in 1844 when he built a telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, DC. The first message sent by the electric telegraph was, "What hath God wrought," from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol in Washington to the railway depot at Baltimore on 24 May 1844. Within ten years, after the first telegraph line opened, 23,000 miles of wire crisscrossed the US.

While Morse was overwhelmed with the idea of helping people send messages to each other in distant places using what he had invented, telegraph proved to be much more than that. Apart from laying the foundation of modern telecommunications, telegraph made significant contribution to the building of America. It had a tremendous impact on the development of the West (US). It made rail travel safer.

Samuel F B Morse Cyrus Field Alexander Graham Bell A Telegraph Model

More than anything else, telegraph allowed businessmen to conduct their operations more profitably. Later on, telegraph became important for the US military and was used first at Varna during the Crimean War in 1854. It was also widely used in the American Civil War. It was telegraph that made war reporting worthwhile as journalists first made use of telegraphy during the Spanish-American War (1898). The first military use for radiotelegraphy was during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–05.

Ten years after the completion of the first telegraph line came another path breaking event in the history of telegraphy, when an entrepreneur Cyrus Field began the quest to lay a telegraphic cable across the Atlantic Ocean. After several failed attempts, in August 1858, Field arranged for Queen Victoria to send the first transatlantic message to the US President James Buchanan.

However, the cable broke after just three weeks. It was only 1866 that finally his project reached completion. This trans-Atlantic cable marked a new beginning, laying the earliest foundations of a connected world. Distance had received its first deathblow.

Ten years later, the world of communications changed forever when Alexander Graham Bell uttered, "Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you," on the telephone. What Bell did was indeed much more revolutionary than the invention of telegraph. However, Bell appears to have spent a lot of time creating awareness and making the telephone socially acceptable and making people (by now comfortable with the use of telegraph for almost 50 years) understand that telephone was a much better invention.

And it was an arduous task, as even the president of Western Union could not understand the import of the invention of telephone. He dismissed an option to buy Bell's patents for $100,000 saying, "What use could this company make of an electric toy?" He was soon proved wrong. Bell established a commercial telephone service in 1877. By 30 June 1887, there were 230 phones installed; in July, there were 750; and in August there were 1,300. Within a decade, by 1897, US had around 167,000. A revolution that would keep recurring, with new vigor in the years to come, had just begun....

Ravi Shekhar Pandey